1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method for the production of low-caloric noodles containing agar and starch as the main ingredients and to the low-caloric noodles obtained by this method.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In recent years, improvement of dietary life has reached a point where an increasing proportion of people suffer from a problem of fatness due to super-nutrition in spite of improved nutritive conditions enjoyed by the majority of people. This problem has caused a serious public concern. It is said that fatness is detrimental to health and forms a major cause for diseases such as hyperpiesia and diabetes and leads to an early death. For the purpose of remedying and preventing this phenomenon of fatness, there have been developed a number of low-caloric noodles. What is called food, by nature, is expected to meet the primary requirement that it should satisfy appetite. For any food, it is quite difficult to satisfy this requirement and, at the same time, another requirement that it should possess a lowered caloric value.
One of the inventions proposed to date concerning the reduction of caloric values concerns agar noodles disclosed by Japanese Patent Publication No. 18220/1974. With agar used as one of the principal raw materials, this invention produces low-caloric agar noodles by a method which comprises mixing a hot agar solution with wheat flour, pouring the resultant mixture into a container, allowing it to cool off and set in the form of agar gel, cutting the gel into a multiplicity of strings, freezing to denature the strings and finally drying the denatured strings. The agar noodles thus produced assume a mouthfeel which is devoid of viscoelasticity and, therefore, is dissimilar to the mouthfeel peculiar to noodles made of wheat flour as a principal raw material. When a mass of gel is formed and then cut into strings of gel, these strings of gel exhibit very weak viscoelasticity and are fragile because the gel is nothing more than a fixed shape of agar retaining a great volume of water. For the purpose of remedying these drawbacks, the strings of gel are subjected to denaturation with freezing. As is frequently observed in dried beanprotein curd and dried bii-fun (rice starch noodles), however, the denatured strings of gel acquire increased hydrophobicity such that even after they are reconstituted with water, they assume a mouthfeel dissimilar to the popular mouthfeel of noodles made mostly of wheat flour. Moreover, this method cannot be called industrially efficient because it entails highly complicated steps such as in forming a mass of gel and cutting the mass into strings and freezing the strings of gel at low temperatures of -10.degree. to -20.degree. C. for more than 24 hours.